The bungled commission that accepted the Fatima visions as true 

As the Church says Satan is very clever, any apparition from God or his servant Mary needs careful checking out in case it is a satanic trick.  This is reasonable.  The Church however when it "approves" an apparition is really approving its message and reserves the right to decide that the apparition never happened if further information comes to light.  An apparition "approved" by a useless or biased commission is not a commission at all.  The approval is invalid and it is sinful to agree with it.  The Church permits you to dispute apparitions that are approved as long as your reasons are charitable and you are open to whatever the truth is.

Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta were the visionaries of Our Lady of Fatima. These three children claimed they saw Mary on a number of occasions in 1917. Francisco and Jacinta died. 

The Church approved the apparitions to the three children as real.  It has never pronounced on the other reported visions or the solar miracle, the miracle of the sun, as real. 

But, the Church investigation was rubbish.  "There was not even a single study session whose minutes are available; properly speaking the commission did not organize any dossier, and it met only at the end, on April 13 and 14, 1930, in a single session during which the report, written exclusively by Doctor Formigao, was read and unanimously approved.  The other deficiencies of the process are the consequence of this lack of effective constitution of the commission. Also, there was no study and discussion session. In number and quality, the official interrogations were very feeble in comparison with the possibilities Fatima offered then, possibilities which are now lost forever.  When the commission was named in May, 1922, the wonderful healings at Fatima were an obvious fact, on everybody's lips. Formigao collected them in his first book. However, no expert research has been done on that subject. Nor was any sort of sub-commission named to work in the company of the experts.

The approval of the main visions was a formality and not the result of careful concern for truth or careful investigation.  Not surprisingly if God could not inspire the Church to do a proper job it is easily seen how Lucia could take advantage of the poor standard taken by the Church.  Her memoirs are full of lies and new inventions.

The Encyclopaedia on Fatima

In the New Catholic Encyclopaedia has an entry on FATIMA.  Read it and learn that the patriarch of Lisbon had got Canon Manoel Formigao to question the children often while the apparitions were happening. The children who could hear the Lady would have been made more careful by this fact. Remember, Lucia was bombastic about her memory in her memoirs. The entry confesses that Lucia was wrong to say the Lady promised that World War One would end on October 13th 1917 but blames her interpretation! Lucia was unlikely to make such a mistake and so her understanding must have been right. Who could forget the day a terrible war was to end and forget that same day too? The Lady had lied so if the Virgin Mary does not lie this lady was not her. And it is no use to blame Lucia for the Virgin having being wrong for the Virgin would have known that the child was not registering it well and told her clearly what she meant once more. In religious ecstasy, the vision and the voice it has sound more real than your daily surroundings so she could not forget.

The commission was started in 1922 when Jacinta and Francisco were dead leaving only Lucia. It was so easy for her then to get it to go her way. And she did keep things from it and yet she accepted their approval of her visions which was dishonest for they had not heard the whole story. A child that deceives will only get worse as she or he grows up.

The entry says that the visions of Lucia subsequent to Fatima were not tested by the Church like the Fatima ones were. The Church may permit them to be preached but neither officially approves or disapproves of them. This proves beyond any doubt that the Catholic Church knows more about the visionaries than it is letting on. It does not trust Lucia. The Church knows that you cannot point to a visionary and say that this vision is true and supernatural and that this other one she had is neither or that they do not know what to make of it. The Church insists that she cannot approve visions if there is any doubt at all. If she starts picking and choosing she could and should accept every apparition in the world as genuine. 
 
God in the Bible (Deuteronomy 18) forbids this selectiveness. He said there that if a prophet is always right and predicts the future right then his revelations are to be entirely thrown out if he makes one false prediction or makes an error.
 
Lucia's visions as a mature woman would surely carry more weight than her visions as a child in 1917.
 
You can get a bunch of experts who will come up with a verdict after a commission and you can set up another with a different selection and the verdict will be the opposite. And even if their verdict is the same the reasons could be very different. In that case neither commission is of any help for it is vital that the same reasons and perceptions be accepted and point to the same result. I mean two experts saying essiac cures cancer means nothing if one of them is convinced by testimonies of cancer patients who were cured and the other thinks there is psychic power in essiac and that is evidence enough that cancer cures must happen. The reasons are more important than the verdict for there can be no proper verdict without them. A person who believes you are good because they saw it in your astrology chart may be right that you are good but they only think it because of a bad reason. It is not you they honour but their perception of you that they get from astrology. That is not honouring the truth. A truth believed for the wrong reason is not a healthy or good truth. It might as well be a lie.
 
Lucia calls us to devote ourselves to Our Lady of the Rosary or Our Lady of Fatima. But all we end up doing is believing experts which is so silly. What makes it worse is that it is experts who have not published their deliberations fully and accessibly for us to peruse. This is why all authenticated apparitions of the Catholic Church should not be taken seriously.

The entry tells us that Lucia contradicted what other trustworthy people said in things which were of secondary importance. We are informed that she did this a number of times. If she was unintelligent or a liar she could not have been a true visionary of the Blessed Virgin who has the power to make a person give her message reliably and who would choose the right person.

Finally, until a proper commission is done and it cannot be done now for Lucia is dead Fatima should be relegated to mere folklore.